


Wedding-Song Triptych

by wishwellingtons



Category: Thick of It (UK)
Genre: F/M, Happy Ending, Julius is straight, M/M, Orchids, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 04:13:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a shock to find, after years of complication and fuck-up and centralised confusion and running on empty, that anything in politics can be simple.</p><p>Sam deserves a happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wedding-Song Triptych

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for serriadh as promptfic on the TTOI comm. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

ONE

  
Sam’s mother is giddy with parental approval. Not since she got her First, eight years ago, has Sam been wafted on quite such high-frequency waves of feminine, hysterical joy. If her mother could stop shrieking and gasping long enough, she’d probably be verbalising plans to choose a hat. Even Sam’s half-brothers – her dad needed the identity of the bald toothy one _explaining_ , and then asked incredulously ‘The one with the hands and the head?” – are grudgingly proud. Sam still smells of Julian’s lavender cologne, and her arms are full of the orchids he bought her, after they’d been dining at the club. It’s a shock to suddenly feel so free and so happy – and to find, after years of complication and fuck-up and centralised confusion and running on empty, that anything in politics can be blessedly simple.

 

TWO

  
“You said they were holding hands?”  
  
“Aye,” says Malcolm, still sounding a little appalled. Jamie sniggers, colonises more of the duvet and yet more of Malcolm’s (limited) body heat.  
  
“Julius probably thinks that’s how girls get pregnant,” he announces, with all the smug surety of one who only had to _look_ at his wife to sire a race of bairns. “Stop worrying, you auld cunt. If he’s holding her hand, the great baldy fuck’ll assume he _has_ to marry her. He’ll go round tomorrow with five dozen fat roses and Great Granny White Slaver Nicholson’s knuckleduster. Lucky Sam, she’ll probably get a tiara.”  
  
“Is there something I should fucking know about, you and jewellery?” asks Malcolm, slightly harrowed by the spectre of either Jamie’s transvestism or kleptomania. The latter, he decides, would be infinitely more expensive.  
  
Jamie kicks him.  
  
“I’m looking out for your wee girl’s future,” he protests, sounding plaintive and zealous at once. Malcolm’s expression says he begs to fucking differ.  
  
“You’ve always hated Julius. You wanted to use his spleen as fucking insulator and teach Maggie to play football using the swollen, inflated remains of his biscuit-stuffed stomach. You tried to draw a penis on his head at Conference.”  
  
“I’m a very generous person. Fucking generous. If this passion for wee Sam takes the baldy cockmonster’s attention away from your emaciated arse, I’m all for it. Sam’ll be a princess or a marchioness or whatever carriage clock title he’s after, and we can go and stay in his castle. Fuck up the portraits. Order porn down his seventeenth-century phoneline. I bet he wants her to look at his _etchings_.”  
  
“If he’s Sam’s – god, this is making my fuckin’ tongue swell - _husband_ , you’re no fuckin' up _anything_ ,” Malcolm growls, fixing him with the warning stare that even Jamie – even bored Jamie, even bored and _pre-coital_ and mid-deluded-fantasist Jamie – has to concede means business. “If Sam decides she likes him, then that’s that.”

 

THREE

  
  
Julius is unerringly proud when she’s with him. She says he’s kind, and she says it often enough that he believes it, and it’s his fiancée’s faith in him which have made the other discrepancies, the less painless areas of his life, no longer matter.  
  
He can _see_ how his life will go, from now on. There is a sense of fitness to it. For such an overread man, Julius had no sense – pompous or otherwise – of how literary theories of love (whether romanticised, or virtuous) might apply to him. He has, he knows, been fanciful, but he’s been remarkably short on _hope_. Meeting Sam was like meeting an old friend – and although in books, this kind of easy understanding conventionally but clears the path for something _greater_ , Julius is beginning to feel he’s the hero, for once. He really _would_ ride a white charger for her, if he could (and Sam knows, and somewhere along the line she loves him even more, for it).  
  
She’s too clever for a story-book heroine, and Julius – dear, decent man that he is, in essentials – has inwardly vowed never to make her a chatelaine (he is, however, rational enough to know that – whatever Sam chooses – they will have the financial power to ensure she need obey nothing but her wishes). She is a friend, indeed, and if Julius is amazed by the sudden profusion of first blessings, he’s too rational a man not to act on them, and Sam too rational and loving a woman not to accept.  
  
He does take round his great-grandmother’s diamond, but Lady Sackville Nicholson was a bluestocking rather than a huntress. Their children are healthy and happy, rather than blue-blooded nutjobs or ratpack neurotics.  
  
And Lord and Lady Nicholson's sex life, throughout - so Sam, tipsily and gladly, confides to Jamie as he makes an enthusiastic godfather to their second child - is _fantastic_ (Julius has a sense of humour and, unerringly, of the _theatrical_ that mingles well with four whole centuries of autocratic excellence. At least, as far as Sam and the new, flushed, radiance on her cheeks is concerned).  
  
Jamie, who adores her as the single perfect female being (he's instructed his girls to model himself on Sam, though not to the extent of marrying Captain Ballbag - albeit a term he'll use affectionately, now he's holding the baldy tart's wean) doesn’t actually _understand_ some of the Latin terms Sam uses, but he looks at Julius with new eyes, and confirms, to a respectful, also-sloshed Frankie , his private theory that it’s the posh lassies that're always the really _filthy_ ones.  
  
Jamie doesn’t let on to the auld fucker though. Best not to upset him.


End file.
